A year ago, Colorado Shakespeare Festival audiences served as a proving ground of sorts for Tina Packer's "Women of Will." This weekend, the CSF is offering a revamped version of the performance.

When Boulder last saw "Women of Will," it was as kind of an out-of-town tryout, the type of thing that happens when shows are bound for New York but need some refinement before getting there.

The play, which traces William Shakespeare's own development through the way his characters appear and the words they say, was conceived and performed by Packer, artistic director of Shakespeare and Company of Lenox, Mass., and Nigel Gore, who is appearing in CSF's 2013 productions of "Macbeth" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

The thesis that drives "Women of Will" is that the female characters in Shakespeare's plays reflect the Bard's society better than the males because they are not caught up in the power structure. This is similar to the concept that artists can best reflect political struggles because they do not carry the power.

During Shakespeare's career, Packer said, his writings portrayed women in three distinct phases:

In the Bard's early years, his male and female characters were "warriors and virgins," respectively.

In the middle of his career, Shakespeare cast women as "heroines who try to find themselves."

Late in his career, the Bard saw women as people who helped others return to their humanity.

Boulder was treated to two versions of "Women of Will" last year: One was a five-evening series in which Packer showered the audience with detailed background information and insights about Shakespeare's women drawn from her years of experience; the other was several performances of an overview that allowed audiences to see a condensed version of the piece in only one night.

Packer will offer viewings of the overview tonight and Saturday, but the piece has undergone a lot of work since last summer.

Packer described the journey the piece has taken since it left Boulder last summer:

"We then went on to Prague, where we were for two or three months, and what we did in Prague is that we repeated the whole cycle of the five parts again so that we had a second kind of go at it.

"It changed and altered, and after Prague we went down to The University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and then we had some independent weeks of rehearsal, as well, in New York City.

"And, of course, when we went into New York we were going to do just the five parts, but we thought we ought to do the overview to let everybody get used to the idea of what we were doing before we went ahead and did the five parts. So we re-rehearsed the overview and put that up and then started rehearsing the five parts underneath that. We ran the five parts every other weekend and the overview every night."

Unlike a standard tour of a show, where the performance is set and the company pretty much does the same show in each place, "Women of Will" continues to evolve with each engagement, Packer said.

The current version of the overview comes on the heels of the five-play series having been rehearsed and performed several times.

"By the time we got back to the overview we had learned much more deeply what we were doing, the overview became more streamlined and it deepened," Packer said. "We collapsed all five parts onto it, so we are really doing the highlights.

"Now that's an incredible journey acting-wise because you're throwing yourself around the stage. You're being murdered one minute, you're being raped the next minute, you're murdering somebody else the next minute and then you're redeeming mankind in the last."

Packer founded Shakespeare and Company in 1978 with the goal of merging the spoken and physical aspects of Shakespearean performance.

Her company offers an extensive list of training options, from classes for professional actors to beginning workshops, including a four-week flagship training program every January.

Her years of working intimately and extensively on Shakespeare's work is all poured into "Women of Will," and it offers insights that feed the interests of disparate disciplines, including historians, dramaturges and sociologists, among others.

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